How To Scale a Development Team

As hackers, we’re familiar with the need to scale web servers, databases, and other software systems. An equally important challenge in a growing business is scaling your development team. Most technology companies hit a wall with dev team scalability somewhere around ten developers. Having navigated this process fairly successfully over the last few years at Heroku, this post will present what I see as the stages of life in a development team, and the problems and potential solutions at each stage. Stage 1: Homebrewing In the beginning, your company is 2 - 4 guys/gals working in someone’s living room, a cafe, or a coworking space. Communication and coordination is easy: with just a few people sitting right next to each other, everyone knows what everyone else is working on. Founders and early employees tend to be very self-directed so the need for management is nearly non...